Architecture and Public Policy

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CIS explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to those changes. This work has lead us to analyze the issue of network neutrality, perhaps the Internet's most debated policy issue, which concerns Internet user's ability to access the content and software of their choice without interference from network providers.

David Segal is the executive director and co-founder of the activism organization Demand Progress, and in that capacity also runs the anti-plutocracy group Rootstrikers. He previously served as a member of the Providence City Council and as a Rhode Island state representative. He ran for Congress in 2010, backed by much of the "netroots", organized labor, and the Rhode Island progressive movement.

Shaheen Shariff, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Integrated Studies, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Dr. Shariff's research and teaching are grounded in the study of law as it impacts educational policy and practice. In particular, she is interested in studying legal issues that emerge in relation to on-line social communications such as cyber-hate, cyber-bullying, sexting, free expression, privacy harm, libel and criminal harassment.

Lauren Turek is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Virginia and a dissertation completion fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations, politics, and 20th-century American evangelicalism. Lauren is currently finishing her dissertation, entitled “To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelicals, Human Rights, and U.S.

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I'm pleased to be part of the inaugural group of security professionals standing up for the rights of technology owners to repair, re-use, fix, modify, and enhance the many modern products they buy, use, and depend on for work and personal use. Securepairs.Org is our voice on this critical architecture and public policy item, which has cybersecurity, operational, and resiliency considerations for every technology user.

I have a new article coming out, called Who Do You Sue? State and Platform Hybrid Power over Online Speech. It is about free expression rights on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, which the Supreme Court has called “the modern public square.” One section is about speakers suing platforms. It looks at cases – over thirty so far – where users argue that companies like Facebook or Twitter have violated their free expression rights by taking down legal speech that is prohibited under the platforms’ Community Guidelines.

This blog has spent a good deal of real estate discussing networked information technologies as tools, but has not yet dealt thoroughly with the qualifier in its title: tools “without handles.” The addition of “without a handle” is intended to indicate that my primary metaphor of a tool in the control of a user - and thus my general preferred approach to Internet policy and regulation, favoring individual control and accountability for uses of tools – needs to be leavened a bit.

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This week, the House will vote on H.R. 1644, introduced by Rep. Mike Doyle, which would reinstate the net neutrality protections of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order as of January 19, 2017. H.R. 1096, a competing measure introduced by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, purports to restore the Open Internet Order’s rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, as well as the transparency rule.

Both bills have been touted as means to restore comprehensive net neutrality protections for all Americans.

In the leadup to the FCC's historic vote in December 2017 to repeal all net neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency.

But unfortunately, millions of those comments were fake. Some of the fake comment were part of sophisticated campaigns that filed fake comments using the names of real people - including journalists, Senators and dead people.

Reconciling Copyright with Cumulative Creativity: The Third Paradigm examines the long history of creativity, from cave art to digital remix, in order to demonstrate a consistent disparity between the traditional cumulative mechanics of creativity and modern copyright policies.

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Comcast Corp. v. FCC is a 2010 United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia case holding that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does not have ancillary jurisdiction over Comcast’s Internet service under the language of the Communications Act of 1934. In so holding, the Court vacated a 2008 order issued by the FCC that asserted jurisdiction over Comcast’s network management polices and censured Comcast from interfering with its subscribers' use of peer-to-peer software.

In 2005, on the same day the FCC re-classified DSL service and effectively reduced the regulatory obligations of DSL providers, the FCC announced its unanimous view that consumers are entitled to certain rights and expectations with respect to their broadband service, including the right to:

"Eshoo and her copanelists, Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, Reddit CEO Steven Huffman, and Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick, remained doggedly optimistic about the future of net neutrality in the United States."

"Van Schewick argued that the motivation for removing net neutrality rules came largely from ISPs looking to capitalize on their positions as gatekeepers. She said that in 2013, prior to net neutrality regulations being put in place, six large ISPs started using “choke points” to slow down certain games and and videos, only speeding them up if the hosting websites were willing to pay.

“The ISPs have more money, and they definitely have more lobbyists,” Schewick said. “But that does not mean they get to win. They only win if we are silent.”"

"Thomas Lohninger, executive director of Epicenter Works, another NGO that ran an ostensibly grassroots campaign against the Copyright Directive, says his group worked with politicians from across the spectrum. “You can find allies in all political parties, and if you are working toward the majority, you also have to talk with all of the people and explore all avenues that you can in order to gain a majority. And that's what we did,” Lohninger says. “There are of course the Euroskeptics, that are fundamentally opposed to every type of European legislation or regulation.

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The University of Washington School of Law is delighted to announce a public workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW’s Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology. The event is free and open to the public but requires registration. -

Attorney and scholar Morgan Weiland ’06 will present Carleton College’s weekly convocation on Friday, April 22 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in the Skinner Memorial Chapel. A leader in the study of the law and policy around the internet and other emerging technologies, Weiland has been active in policy debates surrounding telecommunications, mass surveillance, and network neutrality.

Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. They are also recorded and archived for online viewing at go.carleton.edu/convo/.

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From the First Amendment to net neutrality, How does media regulation affect what we say? The Sixth Annual Rebele Symposium addressed this topic with Mignon Clyburn, Victor Pickard, and Morgan Weiland. Ted Glasser and Christine Larson moderated the event.

Abstract: Behind the hype and tumult of the markets, researchers have been quietly producing a series of exciting results about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In this paper we’ll explain why computer scientists should pay attention to these developments.

When the FCC announced recently that it would adopt new regulations for the Internet – regulations commonly known as Net Neutrality – the announcement was widely cheered by champions of free speech and denigrated by those who feared this was government overreach. One columnist went so far as to say that Net Neutrality would let the government monitor religious leaders and their communications.